My first post here although I have followed Luminous Landscape and the forum for some while. I'd like to pick your brains if I may.

I've used Aperture for a while but am getting increasingly frustrated by it's integration with Photoshop. I have a number of layered PSD files in Aperture but, whenever I try to go back into them to do a bit of tweaking, although they open in CS5 ok, they are always flattened to a single layer. I've tried altering my Aperture preferences every which way and I've also tried having the files as both managed and referenced but to no avail. This means that I cannot re-adjust any of the layers.

I work around this by exporting the file as a master to my desktop and this then opens ok in CS5 with the layers intact. After editing I then have to re-import the PSD file back into Aperture. As a workaround, it does work but is getting very annoying.

I've tried a trial of Lightroom 3 which offers me several options when editing from Lightroom into Photoshop (I.e. edit the original, edit a copy etc) and is much easier. Although I only use Photoshop for maybe 25% of my images, it's enough to get, as I say, quite frustrating.

I don't particularly want to switch everything to Lightroom but, unless I can get this problem sorted it's looking increasingly attractive. I appreciate that Lightroom, being part of the Adobe family, is going to be more integrated but I would have hoped Aperture by now would have evolved enough not to have problems like this. Does anyone have an ideas please?

I may be misunderstanding the issue, but let me try: you know that Aperture doesn't use or understand layers, yes? If you want to edit layers, you have to use Photoshop, or some other image editor that uses layers. The easiest way to do this is to set Photoshop as the external editor in the Export pane of Aperture preferences, and then use the Photos -> Edit with Photoshop command when you want to work on one of those files. I believe that when you do this changes are automatically saved back to Aperture, but don't quote me as I rarely use external editors.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes, I do understand how to edit in Photoshop direct from Aperture but my problem is that the master PSD file(s) have layers and Aperture creates an extra flattened file (much the same as using a NIK plug-in) which is then opened up in CS5. So I have full resolution (but flattened) PSD opened up (which I can apply extra edits to) but have lost my original layers. The layers are still there in the master and if I export this to the desktop and open up in P'Shop are still intact.

I want to open up my file with all the layers there but just can't without the extra step of first exporting the master.

In case anyone may have had the same problem (and for future reference) I've spent most of the last day investigating this problem and think I've solved my problem with losing layers when I try to re-edit in P'shop from Aperture. I had a few images that I had imported into Aperture as layered files. When I tried to re-edit, Aperture created a new flattened version and i couldn't work out why it wasn't preserving the layers.

So I started from scratch again with a single file that was already in Aperture, went to Photos>Edit in CS5, added a layer adjustment, saved and closed P'shop and then went back to Aperture. I did the same to the amended new version and, lo and behold, it opened in P'shop with the new layer showing.

It seems that you definitely have to start from Aperture from the very beginning and that an already layered file that is imported, if sent to P'shop, makes Aperture create a new version which is flattened. So Aperture isn't quite as flexible as I would like but at least I now know the fix!

Incidentally, the same applies to anything edited with (say) NIK plugins for Aperture. Providing I start from with A3, I can use multiple NIK software such as Viveza and then Color Efex and it only makes just one extra version (in other words it keeps re-editing the first extra version).

Hope this makes sense and may be of use to some one. I've found dozens of queries about this on many forums so obviously it wasn't just me tearing my hair out!

First of all, I would like to thank everybody for all the useful & detailed information that’s found in this forum. Although I’ve been following along for quite some time, this is the first time I’ve participated here.

Now back to the PSD flattened layers “mystery”. This is what worked for me (Mac OS X Lion - Aperture 3.2.2. - CS5)

In “External File Editor Color Space”, you need to choose “No Profile Selected” and Aperture will open all of your PSD’s in Photoshop with all your levels showing no matter what color profile is embedded in your files.

Instead, if you choose a color profile from the “External File Color Space” in Aperture, it will only allow you to see all your levels, in Photoshop, of those PSD files with that particular color profile and it will flatten the levels of all the other PSD files that have another color profile embedded.

Aperture isn’t assigning or converting the color space of your files. It only wants to know if how you want to handle this situation. The color profiles that you originally embedded into your PSD’s will be exactly the same when you open them through Aperture and into Photoshop.